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Amazon's Play
Amazon is, to my eyes, the only company playing in the same league as Apple.
Stripe's New Recurring Billing Features
Online payment processing for internet businesses. Stripe is a suite of payment APIs that powers commerce for businesses of all sizes.
9to5
Last week, 9to5mac published this article in which the author intentionally derided me and Instapaper, called it “Instascraper”, and initially accused Instapaper of being responsible for the now-debunked “FBI” UDID leak. Despite my attempts to get them to correct what they wrote, they refused.
Black Swan Farming
September 2012 I've done several types of work over the years but I don't know another as counterintuitive as startup investing. The two most important things to understand about startup investing, as a business, are (1) that effectively all the returns are concentrated in a few big winners, and (2) that the best…
Rick Falkvinge: Why free speech is harmed by the ban on child porn
Child pornography is a toxic subject, but a very important one that cannot and should not be ignored. This is an attempt to bring...
The "Wash my Ferrari" Problem: A Meditation on Risk
The Setup Let’s pretend for a moment that you own a car wash. For $5, customers can drive in for a hand wash and wax. One day, in the midst of the stream of Hondas and Subarus, a customer pul…
APIs for Manufacturing
Perhaps you too remember that crayon-factory segment from Sesame Street. The one where they show dramatic shots of hot orange wax getting poured into vats and molds and eventually labeled and boxed up into neat packages of the rainbow, while Skrillex-junior music played in the background. This was my favorite segment…
Good riddance, PayPal
Elliot Jay Stocks is a designer and author, usually doing something with typography
Google Search is only 18% Search
Google Search is only 18% Search - Monday, 03 September 2012 - Alex's blog
Why Tarsnap doesn't use Glacier
On the surface, Tarsnap sounds like the perfect use case for Glacier. Out of every TB of data stored on Tarsnap, in any given month approximately 100 GB of data will be deleted, while only 33 GB of data will be downloaded; in other words, Tarsnap is very much a "write once, read maybe " storage system. Tarsnap's…
Facebook Handled their IPO Exactly Right
Andrews Ross Sorkin wrote a piece for the NY Times that was just ridiculous. He put the blame squarely on the back of the CFO of FB. Talk about getting it 180 degrees wrong.
37signals invests in The Starter League
Today we’d like to announce that we’ve bought a stake in The Starter League. This is the only investment that 37signals has ever made in another company. What is The Starter League? The Starter League (formerly known as Code Academy) is a small school in Chicago that teaches Rai…
“Me-too” products are fine
This is a guest post from Alex Yumashev. Alex is a founder of Jitbit – a UK-based self-funded startup with a suite of customer support oriented products. You can find his blog at blog.jitbit.com and meet him at the Business of Software 2012 this October. —————————————————————————————————————————————– Does this sound…
Greg Knauss's 10-year-old son's $23,800 bug bite
It’s just after midnight and I’m sitting in a hospital room in the pediatric unit next to my ten-year-old son. He’s asleep now, after a hard day of watching TV and playing games on the iPad and telling me to stop looking at him, geez .
Why you should continue working on your bad idea
"The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out; the brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. The brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They are there to stop the other people!" - Randy Pausch
Tacocopter Basics
The Tacocopters are coming. Sure, the original pitch was a clever troll aimed at credulous and impatient fast-food junkies. But the numbers don’t lie – a typical taco weighs less than a pound, and aircraft that can autonomously fly a few dozen ounces of payload to your doorstep are already available for around a…
Introducing human.io
My small startup, Tasty Labs, has recently launched human.io . Human.io provides a simple way to allow a publisher to turn a passive audience into a mobile army of participants. This allows publishers to easily create missions and activities to get people involved more directly than just reading stuff on a screen. If…
Silicon Valley Is Filled With Liars
Have you been caught telling one of these lies?